The future of television today

I’ve been using Hulu, a website offering streaming full length TV shows for free, quite a bit recently. Hulu is made up from NBC and News Corporation (FOX).

The main television show I have been watching is Family Guy; I have also been watching a couple of episodes of Monk, and Bones. Other shows that are available I watch on normal TV anyway, so there’s no point in doubling up.

The best thing I like about this service is that there are very few ads during what would be an hour show with full ad breaks.

You may wonder how a New Zealand-citizen is accessing the content that is supposed to be locked to all non-US based IP addresses. Good question. I am using a service first highlighted to me by fellow New Zealand blogger, James Fleet, at Half-Geek.

This service called Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree creates a virtual private network (VPN). According to Espen, which told his readers which in turned informed Half-Geek’s readers, the service does this: “VPN creates a “tunnel” connecting a computer on the outside of a network with another computer on the inside. In our case we will connect to a computer in the U.S. making us appear as we are there as well.”

I’ve enjoyed my experience with Hulu so far, and I hope more television networks hope on board this site to make it even better. The only thing they could change is make it into an archive service as well, instead of removing shows after they’ve aired for a set time-frame.